The yoke's on Gordon's apparatchiks

How pathetic Labour MPs have proved to be! Faced with the choice of going down to certain defeat under Gordon Brown next year, or possibly a slightly less horrible defeat under someone else this year, they decided to do nothing. At their meeting on Monday, Brown's speech was greeted with clapping and the traditional banging of desks. Speeches calling for his resignation were met with silence, as the whips noted who had dared to express agreement by hand or by word.

They have spent so many years bending to have the yoke slipped over their shoulders they don't know how to react to the chance of independence, like ex-cons who can't cope with freedom and offend again in order to be sent back to jail.

I was reminded of the old joke about a party meeting addressed by Stalin. Apparatchiks have been summoned from all over the Soviet Union. They sit in silent dread, for they know the fate of anyone who dares interrupt the great leader's oration. After two hours Stalin is winding up and some poor man in the middle can't hold a sneeze in any longer. For ages he struggles but then it bursts out. Stalin stops abruptly. "Who sneezed?" he roars.

There is silence, though the delegates nearest the unfortunate one gesture towards him, petrified they might be suspected. Finally the sneezer somehow stumbles to his feet.

The assembly waits in terror. Then Stalin speaks. "Bless you," he says.

The Tories at least have a secret weapon: disloyalty. Of their last seven leaders four went before they were pushed, and three were briskly dispatched. Labour leaders usually go when they're good and ready.

• I don't want to bore you with our problems in London, but the tube strike has been annoying. One consolation is that it's been full of delicious ironies. Bob Crow, the RMT leader, manned a picket line beside a banner reading: Safety Not Profits. An estimable view, except that one of the main causes of the strike was management's refusal to re-employ a tube driver who had opened the doors on the wrong side!

Does Mr Crow believe that the working classes will rise against their oppressors behind the proletarian vanguard of the RMT? Perhaps so, though with a fixed income of £40,200 a year, drivers are better off than most of their passengers. However, many revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Che Guevara, have emerged from the bourgeoisie.

I suspect Mr Crow just adores strikes, and gets a thrill out of them, like some old high court judges were said to have done when they sentenced someone to death.

• Amid huge ballyhoo, after weeks of effort, Yasmina Siadatan won this year's The Apprentice. And the glamorous job she now gets? "She will work for Amscreen, Sir Alan Sugar's digital signage company, selling advertising space in NHS waiting rooms." How fortunate the losers must feel!

• Reality television can go too far. The brother of a friend of mine worked on that rather good ad for Specsavers, the one which shows an elderly couple sitting on what they think is a bench on the prom. It turns out to be on a rollercoaster with a water splash at the end. It took two days to film, with the couple making horrified faces, and their body doubles hurtling round the rollercoaster again and again. At the very end – and this was Blackpool in February – without warning, they threw a bucket of water in their faces. Which is why they look so genuinely horrified.

• Michael Green, a GP in Stockport, sends me a recruitment ad for the NHS in Leicester. "We are looking for members from the Midlands health economy for our first Clinical Cabinet… the Cabinet will drive an integrated ­approach to strategic change based on the Next Stage Review workstreams… raise the quality of our strategic leadership to ensure our commissioning priorities… working ­culture of determination, ­passion and commitment … new approach to commissioning and clinical engagement …" and so on and on.

Dr Green writes ruefully, "this is not just gobbledegook to be scoffed at and ignored. The health service is throwing billions at such schemes, preferably run by private companies, while continuing to starve hospitals and primary care of the clinical staff they need to run a decent service."

• Here is an off-the-wall joke I like, sent in by a reader who alerted me to a wonderful American website: Old Jews Telling Jokes. Kelly is having his hair cut by his barber, Luigi, who asks where he's going for his holidays. "Italy," says Kelly.

"It's a tourist trap, a rip-off. Go somewhere else. What you gonna do in Rome?"

"We hope to see the pope."

"Sure, you'll see him, looking like my thumb from two football fields away."

A month later Kelly is back. Luigi says: "I was right, right?"

"Well," says Kelly, "Alitalia treated us great, we loved Rome, the hotel upgraded us to a suite, free. At the Sistine Chapel I leant on a panel – it swung open and revealed a private chapel with the Holy Father sitting there.

"He beckoned us in and he said: 'I'm gonna bless you. But first, ya know I've been pope a few years now, and almost every day I bless the crowds in St Peter's Square. Three, maybe four million people. Half of them are men. Do the math.